In a viral online video, home security camera footage appears to capture bunnies jumping on a trampoline at night. Can that footage possibly be real? The video at first seems to be a cute animal video that is typical for social media, however a closer look reveals that the bunnies are actually artificial intelligence (AI) and the entire video is fake.
Misinformation and unreliable sources in the media are abundant. For this reason, media literacy in the Revere Local School District is a high priority.
The Washington Post published a story about the AI bunny story with an August 8, 2025, article titled How to Spot an AI video? LOL you can’t by Shira Ovide, which reported that audiences watched the original TikTok video more than 230 million times. The article outlines that tactics to determine if an image is AI generated or real have become obsolete to the point that professionals have difficulty telling the difference.
In an attempt to combat this growing concern, Revere began implementing classes so that students have the skills to discern credible media from unreliable media. Marcia Roach, the Director of Curriculum in the Revere Local School District, stressed the role that school districts have in readying their students to become capable media consumers.
“I truly believe that one of the most important things that we do as an education system is prepare students to be critical consumers of information, and that has become more and more important. There are videos that are clearly AI that the more that we look at it and ask ourselves the right questions, the more we are able to identify that there is a different actual reality. I think that is a critical skill for people to have in order to make our society move in the right direction,” Roach said.
Revere High School (RHS) principal Doug Faris also expressed the importance of media literacy among students, speaking to the amount of information available to them now through technology.
“Especially for our kids, you have access to unlimited resources through your iPads, and then at home through your phones. [We are] helping you to understand what is credible, what is useful, what is important, anything we can do, you are not going to want to rely on just technology to just make those decisions,” Faris said.
Donnell Probst, the Interim Executive Director at the National Association of Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), said that the main importance of media literacy is to prepare students to be able to use and understand modern technology.
“We are in that period right now of trying to catch up with AI, and it is going to be a while as we all figure out how to best work with these technologies. But I think we are at a risk of if it advances too quickly and people get too nervous, that will be restricting students from learning how to use it in effective and positive ways which they are going to need when they go into the workforce,” Probst said.
NAMLE is a national non-profit organization founded in 1997 that works with members, organizations and corporations to move media literacy research into practice in classrooms. Throughout the year, they hold a professional development conference for educators, host a Youth Advisory Council, the National Media Literacy Alliance and produce other resources. At the end of October, NAMLE will host the United States Media Literacy Week, which is an event part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) global media information week. Their goal is to help teachers understand and communicate media literacy to their students and implement it into school curriculum.
“NAMLE defines media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication. Media literacy is a very broad field. For example, AI literacy is media literacy; when we talk about privacy, that is media literacy. It is a process that can be applied to any technology, any form of media, any situation where you are engaging with media; whether it is a video game or a magazine or a TikTok or . . . on Discord, media literacy can apply in all of those contexts,” Probst said.
Media literacy is not just taught at RHS; it is an aspect of every student’s educational experience from pre-K to their senior year.
Cynthia Beshara, the Media Specialist for the Revere District, creates lesson plans for her elementary students that introduce them to the topic of media literacy.
“In my day-to-day job, I work with the third through the fifth grade, so I am able to incorporate media literacy lessons in different activities and lesson plans that I create for those grades. For fourth and fifth graders, we analyze commercials to try and figure out what advertising techniques are being used to try to get consumers to purchase a certain product,” Beshara said.
As students transition into middle school, the lesson plans begin to incorporate issues students will encounter using digital media.
“In the sixth grade and seventh grade, there are required courses, mainly collective courses. There is digital citizenship and digital literacy. The digital literacy course is more so moving into the awareness of being a critical consumer of information,” Roach said.
Media literacy is also a part of the social studies and English Language Arts (ELA) curricula that further expand students’ knowledge on the topic.
“Part of ELA and social studies programming as a whole helps students to assess the validity of what is in front of them and content that is part of the ELA standards, starting more so in the sixth through twelfth grades; all those research pieces are part of the writing standards and analysis, especially the information tech standards where we are looking at the different content and assessing arguments then being able to create our own,” Roach said.
In the high school, Faris takes pride in the teachers’ work towards educating the students on media literacy. As he walks the halls, he takes notice of how teachers talk with their students about creditable sources and information.
“I love when I hear our teachers talking about making sure kids check their sources and having that ability to truly comprehend and decipher what is accurate and what is not. Every time I am in the classrooms, I always hear teachers talking about making sure that our kids understand the credibility of the source and truly understand the different perspectives out there and that not everything they see on the news is one hundred percent accurate or trustworthy,” Faris said.
In her work with NAMLE’s Youth Advisory Council, Probst sees that people brought up in the age of technology have certain advantages and unique perspectives on media literacy. Probst refers to these people as digital natives.
“It is very clear that youth do not view their experiences with media in the same way adults view their experiences with media. I think that youth are cognizant of many of the pitfalls of the media. I think that they understand how excessive media use can impact your mental well-being,” Probst said.
Roach shared the view that she feels, as an adult, she could learn from a younger generation that is more familiar with the media.
“I think there is an advantage to being a digital native and being able to spot things. There are always generation gaps when it comes to topics, and as it pains me to say, as a middle-aged person, I can learn from the lens of a more digital native when it comes to media literacy,” said Roach.
Roach told a story of her own experience with an online AI video—the bunnies jumping on the trampoline. To her, this video is an example of the importance of media literacy in a changing world and the advantage digital natives have in it.
“What I thought was the bunny jumping on the trampoline I thought was real. Everything that we have access to is going to change at a faster rate than our brains, we can not even comprehend. I have to ask my teenage daughter if videos were created by AI sometimes. I will say ‘is this AI?’ and I can see her roll her eyes at me and tell me ‘yes, that is one hundred percent AI,’” Roach said.
